 Hi everyone, it's good to be here this afternoon. My name is Allison Armstrong. I'm the associate director for research and education at the Ohio State University Libraries. And on behalf of myself and my two colleagues, Maris Mandirnak, our head of research services, and Josh Sidvari, our Research Commons manager and GIS specialist, I'm delighted to be here today to talk about our research commons. This is the presentation outline. There should be plenty of time for questions at the end. And my focus today is on partnership development, showing our determination from early on in the process to create a suite of co-located services that taken together would advance researchers' agendas, lessen pain points, promote interdisciplinarity, showcase output, and highlight impact. And I want to say that we'll ask a question. How many of you were at the Clemson presentation besides our presenters over here? And then a number of you at the presentation from Calgary about multidisciplinary. Yeah, I think that we can congratulate the planners of the conference because this should bookend that series of presentations very nicely. So a little bit about Ohio State, we're a top public university. We have an enrollment of 58,000 undergraduates. So scale has necessitated our conversation when we talk about researchers to advanced researchers. Our library, our system has 13 departmental libraries, and the Research Commons is located on the third floor of our 24-7 facility. And it's pretty centrally located on campus. I'm going to take a moment to read our brief mission and vision statements, and then I will drill down into the characteristics of the Research Commons. So our mission statement, the Research Commons at the Ohio State University Libraries leverages campus partnerships to provide support services at each stage of the research lifecycle. It enhances the library's mission by providing a hub for collaborative interdisciplinary research that is both expertise and technology enabled. And then our vision is to create an inspiring suite of services and resources that will enable and drive innovation, motivate and enable research, allow for happy accidents to occur, and provide an environment for dynamic interdisciplinary research that moves Ohio State from excellence to eminence. We define the Research Commons in three key aspects, as a network, as a space, and as a place. And I'll go through each one of those. As a network, we're a network of people, of experts, partners, collaborators, with knowledge, subject expertise, technology expertise, an awareness of campus and library resources, and services that are available all over. We exist to facilitate the connections between researchers and expertise at the point of need. OK? Try one more time. OK. This is our version of the research lifecycle. And this is our conceptual underpinning for the network, for the network of experts of people. And most of these are library resources. We have one partnership in there. The Copyright Center is funded in part by our Office of the Chief Information Officer. They support some of the positions in there. The libraries already serve the functions of a connector, providing resources and services at each stage of the research lifecycle. So it's a natural framework for articulating internal partnerships. So it works well building those partnerships across campus. The Research Commons enhances and expands the network of research support on campus. And the focus is on the importance of the libraries within that network. Defining the Research Commons as a space, we began to define it early on in our visioning process with the architects and design team. We articulated five guiding principles. And I'll have those up on a slide in just a little bit. But they're flexible, creative, purposeful, integrated technology, and unique. OK. I'm not sure what the right angle is for this clicker. I'll try and get it. So here's the first visual. And I'll have a lot of images of various parts of our Research Commons. So we just opened. In January 2016, we are centrally located on campus, as I mentioned, in our 24-7 facility. And we are focused on advanced researchers. And I will drill down into some of these spaces. Let's see if I have my laser pointer. The main area is our colloquia space. We have data visualization, brainstorming. And the next image of our brainstorming room, you'll see that there's a divider wall in there. We have project rooms, classroom, computer lab, conference, gallery area. And when you get off the elevators, you run right into our concierge desk. And here's the same image, but it's the architect's rendering of it. So we've got the colloquia space set up lecture style. We've got extra seating off to the side that I didn't mention before. A gallery space with four large display screens so we can show either complementary information to what's going on in the event space or what is actually going on in the event space. Either way, we can account for that. OK. Up here, this is our computer lab. And it has an advanced suite of software. And we think of it as a good place for researchers to hunker down and do some dedicated work. Over here is one of the small project rooms. We have three project rooms. There's monitors in each one of them. People can connect to them with their wireless devices. One conference room, it's a little more formal than the project rooms. We have video conferencing available. So when researchers need to talk to their colleagues who are outside of the university or even across the university, we can allow for that. And then our colloquia space. And this is a different configuration than the lecture style. And we often leave it this way if no one's in use because the graduate students love to just come in and sit down and work independently. See if I've forgotten anything. And this is our main space for events, workshops, colloquia. And here we have the brainstorming room being used. It's a larger collaborative space. Users can connect with their own wireless devices and take control of the projector. Our data visualization area, we have four screens. I think Clemson, did you have a huge wall? I was quite jealous. It was very exciting to see. This works across different platforms. Again, users can take control of all of the screens, some of the screens, so it's multi-device and, as I say, across various platforming platforms. Here's one of our, again, another brainstorming space. This whiteboard turns into a digital whiteboard so that notes can be saved with the projected image and taken with you. The wall that divides our brainstorming room is also a whiteboard on both sides. And then we have, down here in the data visualization, a desk or tabletop area for visualization. And again, this can be thrown up through the projector and displayed to groups at a time. I think for the people in the back, if you want seats, there's some scattered around. So if you want to come squeeze in, please feel free, or not, close enough. And then the third aspect of our research commons is as a place. So establishing the research commons as a place happens through the integration of the network of people and the physical space and the services that will be deployed there. So it's a space and a place that is based on what the researchers will make of it and what we can help them do with it throughout their own research lifecycle, their independent work and how we can help them with that all here. So when we look at the services and talk about the research commons as a place, we have four aspects to that. Education and training, consultations, referrals, and showcasing research. This is our colloquium space again, and this is a workshop for grant writing that we conducted earlier this semester. This could be one of the 50 or more workshops that we've offered to date. Attendance can vary from 10 to 60, but the average workshop attendance is around 20 to 25. We offer consultations. Our partners have office hours in the space, copyright resources, data management. Those are internal services that we have space in there in addition to their own office hours. And then people like IRB, Office of Research, the Writing Center, they will offer consultations in our space. And both the space and expertise can be scheduled online by users. And then we have referrals, the warm handoff, knowledgeable staff. This is our program assistant, and we conceived of this position as a concierge, someone who's really there to greet people and help them move, whether it's throughout the space or throughout campus, finding the appropriate resources and support. And she's talking to one of the graduate students. And then showcasing research. This is one of the steam factory folks who are in, I think they're doing something on sustainable cities. But we try and bring in a variety of speakers, particularly interdisciplinary speakers. So now that we know what we are, I want to talk a little bit about how we got there. And that's, I think, critical to our success. I want to start with a fairly traditional timeline that's going to focus largely on the research commons as space. We trace our start back to 2012 with a white paper entitled Overview of Research Commons in Academic Libraries by one of our lead librarians, Craig Gibson. And this is just an overview, as you might expect, of looking at all kinds of different similar spaces, whether they're learning commons or information commons and pulling those together. And then in 2013, we have an internal task force library faculty and staff. And they take that report and put it into action steps. In late 2014, we are interviewing design and construction teams with their IT partners. Our two lead players, Maris and Josh, are developing measurement and assessment techniques document that will come in and play a prominent role as we move forward. We are also fortunate that our consortium, the CIC, the Committee on Cooperation, the library piece of that, the CLI has a workshop at Indiana. And we can look at their scholars come and investigate that. So we've looked at spaces over time and seeing the changes and what people are doing is just incredibly informative. And then we have construction. And our research commons opens in 2016. One of the exercises we went through with the design architect team was a visioning process. So our visioning and mission statements come from the work that we did very, very early on with that group. And there was a large group from the libraries who participated in that. So you can see, maybe not, you can look at the slides later. And the font might be more readable. But again, we have those five guiding principles down below and then some of the brainstorming that took us into that particular vocabulary and concepts. And then we also were presented with different concept designs. Very similar, but somewhat different. And we ended up mostly with the concept 1B. And now I want to switch to a different kind of timeline. This is really the timeline that is about partnership and developing as a network. So it's a little bit different. Our markers are somewhat different, though we start and end in the same place. We've got the white paper. But then we immediately go into listening sessions with our graduate students. And one of the big drivers behind developing the research commons is that we had heard through our live quals survey often enough that graduate students had no home. We have 58,000 students, 45,000 are undergraduates. They are everywhere. And important and lovely as they are, they crowd out a lot of other spaces for a lot of other people. And it was acute for our graduate students. So we started listening to them and thinking of them. And they're really the core of our advanced researchers. We developed a partners advisory committee and I'll have a slide with the list of the partners in just a moment. We're hiring all kinds of people, data management. We get our GIS person on board, our research commons manager back in 2014. And that was just critical to our success. This person has done unbelievable work, particularly in going and knocking on doors and introducing himself and the services to every group at every orientation, just phenomenal work. It's made a huge difference. And then we also had our business librarian connect us with a marketing class. A senior capstone marketing group took the research commons on as a project. So there were five teams of students developing marketing programs for our research commons and they provided us with an enormous amount of information. One of the things they helped us with was make sure we articulate the advanced researchers, not just researchers, because they reminded us clearly that undergraduates do a lot of research, but that our focus seemed to be not just any researcher but those advanced researchers. They also gave us our tagline of connect, contribute, collaborate. We tweaked it around a little bit, but they gave us the basis for that. And then we also worked with developing use cases and worked with both our IT partners in the library as well as with a campus digital humanities working group. And when we had originally thought to hire a digital humanities librarian, we also developed use cases. And I can have some of those in the back and if we have time and you want to hear specifics, I can share those with you or send them to you if you shoot me an email. We held two positions for IT support for the research commons and the first of those positions came on board in January. And this colleague is IT support like a desktop or desk help supports person. And he's proved invaluable. He hooked me up so I could make sure my technology worked for the presentation. He's incredibly helpful and has been called upon for a bunch of different things. We also hired half a dozen student workers, graduate students. And we brought them on board the November before we opened. And they worked at our general reference desk in our main library for six weeks. And we then followed up with a two day training bootcamp before they took any hours on the public desk. This is a slide of our partners. It stayed fairly static. The one group that we've added is from the Graduate Student Association. They meet about once a semester. The agenda is fairly informal. They come to talk about, for a long time it's been updates. Where are we? Where are we progressing? Are there gaps? And we do work with our undergraduates. But we like to work with them in a coordinated effort and not just have them come into haphazardly. We also think of education and training as a partnering endeavor. So here are some of the workshops that we've done around the research lifecycle. When we first heard from our graduate students, we asked them about workshops that would appeal to them. And they were quite clear that unless we were doing a two for one, two topics that would bring them in, they were not going to leave their offices. That they really needed a compelling reason to come out to venture out of their offices. And that worked for a long time. We've since heard otherwise, and we're now being much more focused and narrow. But I think it's because our brand has been successful that they know when they come into the research commons that it'll be worthwhile. So these are just some of the topics that we've covered. And we usually, in our partnerships, have a campus person as well as a library person. We developed a website early on. So our website came into its first incarnation in August 2014. And it serves as a virtual referral point. Up here we have some of our colleagues. We call them experts. They're from the Office of Research, who's been one of our main partners. We collected some basic back statistics about how many people have hit the website, done that, just so we can see as we make changes and add to it what the changes in traffic will be. This just shows some of the groups that we've developed our use cases with. It's the digital humanities working group on campus. And just an example of some of the text that demonstrates some of those use cases. And then we really are interested in growing our network and building partnerships, not just keeping the same ones. We want to deepen those, but work across campus. So we have our university libraries partners, our campus partners. And we've also had some interest in the community. We've brought them in a little bit, but that's stretching us a little bit for the start. So the timeline for the partnership is important because it allows us to forge these strong networks. It increases the community awareness and it highlights services and has really, for us, built brand recognition. One of our great concerns, because again, of the number of undergraduates, was that if we built this and it was empty, it would fill up with the students who were going to use it to sit down and study. And that's not what we brought this online for. So we've been very careful. We were very deliberate about placing our concierge desk right by the elevator. So when students come in and look lost, we gently but consistently redirect them to other spots, both within the library and around campus. So that's sort of what we are, how we got there. And now I'm gonna look a little bit about going forward. I mentioned that we had developed success measures and assessment techniques document. And that was based on the visioning work that we did way back in the beginning. I'll go through each of those so you can get a sense. And this is really a work in progress. Some of these are panning out a little more robustly than some others. And we intend to check back also with our stakeholders about what they consider to be success. But these weren't entirely developed in isolation. We always had our partners in our conversations. So counting's good. We wanna know how many people have been in our spaces but we wanna know who they are as well. So we've done a good job of bookkeeping and tracking folks. So we started offering services back in September of 2014 and through March we've had more than 50 workshops, panel discussions or showcase events and over 1200 attendees. And 18 of our events have occurred within the first eight weeks of us being open. And as you can see from this slide up here, we've been successful in getting those advanced researchers into our space. So we've got 81% of our traffic is advanced, graduate students are higher. Traffic on the virtual space, as I mentioned, we've benchmarked numbers about who has been at our site which is fine. But it doesn't really tell us much except if we compare it to other things. So as we change services, bring new things online, we'll look to see whether or not we're getting more traffic, different kinds of traffic. We've also added cues to be able to better handle our email and chat. Another success measure, repeat customers, creating a community is what we think of it as. So in addition to our website hits on the pages, we also have a Twitter account with 100 followers. We'll see how that grows. And an email list served with about 400 subscribers. Again, we'll see who stays, who gets added to that. Of the more than 400 attendees that we've had recently, we've had 33 individuals who have attended multiple events. So again, creating the community, building a following loyalty. We've had one person who came to seven events, so a groupie perhaps. But we're excited about that. We want to build up that community and get some loyalty. And here we have partners on campus we work with in all kinds of opportunities. Our office for distance education and e-learning. And they've used our space sort of as a one-off. They've had occasion to have meetings and they found that the Research Commons is just the perfect place for them to do some brainstorming. We've also had groups like the Department of Anthropology that comes in every other Thursday to have their meetings around what kind of research they're working on, who's doing what, practice for presentations that are coming up. I think this group over here are applied plant sciences who came in just for a meeting. So we want to build up the loyalty but we'll take the one-offs as well. One of the most successful partnerships that we've had and our repeat customers is around the writing group. And when I looked at my notes, this spring all of the 10 writing groups, I thought 10 writing groups. That's a lot of writing groups to have into this space but in fact we have 10 different writing groups who are using the Research Commons. We've got some that are working on grant writing, writing journal articles, dissertations, thesis and these groups are further splintering and organizing into small informal working groups. So it's growing out like a tree and we're delighted for that. So the partnerships and the collaboration have been very successful. Our office hours have also been successful. The IRB folks have doubled their hours since they started. They're very popular, no surprise. I don't think they quite knew that but none of us were surprised that there's a great demand for them to be accessible and easily found by people around campus. And I think I mentioned in our workshop development we started with the two for one idea. We have now, based on the feedback, moved to a much more directed and deep model so we will just do data management plans for biomedical researchers. So we've found that there is now a need to narrow what we're doing. And then partnerships within the library. So this is a screen capture from a collaborative effort between the head of special collections and our GIS specialist. This is a digital story map that complimented a physical exhibit that we have in our main library. And just another example of librarians coming together. This is an ACRO webcast of engaging in the digital humanities. Breaking the silos was another area where we wanted to have success, those happy accidents that we envisioned. So we've had a couple of very large events. This one is in our Thompson library and it's GIS for the rest of us. Another workshop that we've offered is having our partners do a partners day lining the perimeter with tables, speakers of the various partners so they could get to know each other, what each other are doing and learn a little bit more about what's going on on campus. And our GIS for the rest of us, this is where we've had some community partners come in but there were I think 60 attendees coming from nine different colleges. Yeah. And the community participated in that particular event. And again, another steam exchange, our science, technology, engineering, arts and math. And breaking the mold, we wanted to make sure again that these services were directed at our advanced researchers and they were like nothing else. So this is just a reflection of that. One of our graduate students who has been here for a while and just hasn't been able to find a home has found it. We also had a student come off of the elevator, look around and say, wow, there's a Hilton in the library. I mean, it is just a much different look and feel. Another area where we've had success and I think we really wanna look into this and dig a little deeper is as a valued resource around recruiting. So what we've discovered in our cookies in the commons particularly, graduate students are coming in with their friends who are not yet enrolled in graduate programs and showing us off as a place and a resource and a real hook to bring them into the university. We've had one department, our women's gender and sexuality studies use this during a faculty recruitment and we would like to push that and make that more of a success story that we can share with the campus that's really about the campus and helping other people be successful. And then our long-term thinking, we want more of a plan going forward. We'd like both a programmatic plan and then an assessment plan that matches that. So we wanna be a little more intentional about where we're going, what we're doing and then how we know that we've done a good job. The value that our partners bring to the research commons is important to us. The value the research commons provides to our partners and the value of the research commons network to the whole campus. We wanna make sure that we can pull all of those things together and with that, thank you and we have time for conversation, questions, comments. Well, thank you very much.